Next week, Apple will host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. During that stretch of time, the company will be debuting new features and more, which will include updates to its augmented reality platform, ARKit.
Reuters is reporting on Friday that Apple plans on introducing at least one new major feature for ARKit at WWDC next week: phone-to-phone AR experiences. The idea, according to the information, is that Apple wants two devices, two separate iOS devices, to be able to view and track the same virtual image at the same time.
The process will be local to each device, which Apple will implement to handle any privacy concerns between devices:
“Apple next week will debut tools to let two iPhone users share augmented reality. The goal is for two users to see the same virtual object in the same space via their individual devices. The approach, which has not been previously reported, differs from Google’s, which requires scans of a player’s environment to be sent to, and stored in, the cloud.”
On top of that, this new report echoes what we had heard late last month, that Apple will introduce AR-based multiplayer gaming for the ARKit framework as well. Both of these new features are expected to be part of the ARKit 2.0 rollout, which, after debuting later this month at WWDC, should launch to the public later in the year, probably in September along with the public launch of iOS 12 and new iPhone models.
In addition to that, iOS 12 is said to also be introducing new NFC-based features, too.
Source: Reuters